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So what did Bob Dylan and George Harrison do when they hung out together? For one thing, I think they smoked a lot of pot. Dylan seems to have arrived in England sans marijuana — he’d been traveling internationally and, unlike The Beatles, didn’t have a guy whose job it was to carry his dope for him — but George came to the rescue, arriving with a prodigious stash apparently supplied by Ringo.
In the recollection of Ray Foulk, one of the organizers of the Isle of Wight Festival, they sat down at one point to listen to Abbey Road.
[George] had an acetate of it. He put it on the record player in the barn and there was a lot of envy in the air… but he was moaning about how John and Paul wouldn’t let him have more than two songs and how unfair it was. I was surprised how openly he was saying all this.
Later, Foulk says, he walked in on Dylan and Harrison duetting on the Everly Brothers’ “All You Have to Do Is Dream” — an intimate moment, that. Of The Beatles, George was by far the closest to Dylan; in fact, theirs was a bromance of the highest order. The first (and possibly only) song they wrote together, “I’d Have You Anytime,” essentially tells the story of their relationship; as some Wikipediaite put it,
Harrison’s verses urge the shy and elusive Dylan to let down his guard, and the Dylan-composed choruses respond with a message of welcome.
The demo that they made together sounds like this:
And George’s version was the first song on All Things Must Pass:
Later, of course, George and Bob were Traveling Wilburys together. Hmm. I wonder, is it possible I might have underestimated the Wilburys, due to youthful intergenerational bias? Something to explore… but on some other day. Over and out for now.